There is no real art in America other than business, and anyone who thinks that there is is crazy. People who are artistic and who are working for big companies are dead, are dead men. You can’t work for a big company and have any respect for yourself unless you’re out to make money. People plunge their careers and their lives headlong into making money – and when they get it, they don’t like it, they don’t need it and they don’t know what to do with it. Money is the last refuge of people who’ve been scared by life, whose only way to survive is to acquire as much money and power as they can – to protect themselves. But from what? We’ve got to realize that money is useless beyond whatever it takes to feed, clothe and house yourself. As a matter of fact, the more you have beyond that – whatever it takes to free you from those basic concerns – the more difficult it is to find out what really matters and to get it for yourself.

It’s true that the women in my films are continuously being doublecrossed by men. They really are, and they recognize it. And my point of view in presenting it is, ‘All right. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to put up a wall around you, or are you going to fight to protect some of your innocence?’ No matter what the current trends are, a woman must fight to keep her own responsiveness alive.

As for showing the sexual act in film, I think that’s a lot of balls, phony, exploitative and commercial. It’s cheap voyeurism and I think there’s too damned much of it now anyway. It makes me very angry. If that makes me a prude, so be it. I think some things are private, and just as I wouldn’t show a person dying – I mean the death rattle, the actual last private agony of death – I wouldn’t show that intense private joy of intercourse. Playboy magazine, tit films and cocktail-party diatribes have not only affected our society but have shaped it with such discontent regarding men and women that sex is no longer in itself sufficient without violence, death or neurosis as stimulants.

To rap Nixon, even if you don’t like him, is a cop out. To put your life’s problems on the war or the impending threat of the bomb is a cop-out, because everyone knows, and still feels, that it begins with you. That life begins with yourself and your relation to people, your feeling about them, and your ability to stand up for something at the right time. To stand up for every individual thing that you really feel and not let that die, even if you have to do it all alone.

I make films about social relationships. I strongly believe that we are social animals and the nature of living is defined not by money, political power and the like, but by virtue of the fact that we are social beings. The problem with people in America is that they are so politically oriented, so economically oriented, that the human level has disappeared and there is only an abstract level of agreement – and that’s lifestyle. If your lifestyle is like my lifestyle, then we like each other. If your lifestyle is not like my lifestyle then we can see nothing in each other.